From: Ian Wright (wrighti@acm.org)
Date: Sun Jun 29 2008 - 12:51:30 EDT
Dogan In Marx and Engels' time the word "dictatorship" referred to a temporary emergency institution during transitional crisis, not the idea of a continuing dictatorship. The meaning of the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" was abused to justify the wresting of power from the working class by the Bolsheviks. In all Marx and Engels' voluminous writings the term "dictatorship" is linked to the working class a total of only 16 times. Many of these instances were used when Marx and Engels' were working in a united front with the Blanquists, and functioned as a compromise slogan. Others instances were employed to differentiate and distance Marx and Engels' ideas from the Blanquist conspiratorial approach. Other instances were employed to distinguish themselves from the anarchist idea of immediate dissolution of the state. The "dictatorship of the proleteriat" is very far from the "very essence of Marx's teaching" as Lenin would have it, and it emphatically did not mean continuing rule by a totalitarian one-party state. On this issue, Richard Hunt's "The political ideas of Marx and Engels", volumes 1 and 2 (1974), is a tour-de-force. He recovers Marx the radical democrat from the totalitarian tradition. I think the litmus test of a socialist economy is democratic control, including such things as control in the workplace, and control over the allocation of surplus-labour to either new production or a reduction in the length of the working day. In a one-party state there is no democratic control of this kind. The internal constitution of the single party becomes the de facto constitution of the whole social organism. You at least need multiple competing parties. > So this is the characterisation of a capitalist society and challange to > your illusionary concept of socilism: "when everyone's entitled to get > as much for himself as he can, all available property, however much > there is of it, is bound to fall into the hands of a small minority, > which means that everyone else is poor." How are you going to face this > challange. Markets of large numbers of people by definition have weak micro-level coordination. This means they tend to enter states of statistical equilibrium which have maximum entropy subject to any macro-level constraints. So More is quite right: wealth gets scrambled and moves toward an inegalitarian distribution, and this in many ways can be considered a "natural necessity". But the distribution of wealth that we see in capitalism is of a distinctive kind. There's a long power-law tail due to capitalist profit-income. If a society had different rules that controlled the distribution of income -- in other words different macro-level constraints -- you would get much more egalitarian distributions of wealth even with markets. So market socialism does not necessarily entail capitalist inequality. To get a perfectly equal distribution of wealth the society would need to formulate and enforce rules that tightly constrain the economic activities that people can engage in; in other words, you'd need a powerful mechanism to prevent the increase of entropy. In the past, so-called Marxist states have employed a large bureaucracy to achieve this aim. I welcome Alejandro's perspective on these issues. And the history of the working class movement, including its theory and practice, is not exhausted by a certain kind of interpretation of Marx. The tradition is richer and more contested than that. -Ian. _______________________________________________ ope mailing list ope@lists.csuchico.edu https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/ope
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